Chris and Martin talk about the features and benefits of CXL, or Compute Express Link with CXL Chair Jim Pappas.
#216 – The Data Explosion with VAST Data CEO Renen Hallak
This week, Chris chats to VAST Data CEO, Renen Hallak about the explosion in data and the challenges of analysing and managing huge quantities of unstructured content. VAST Data has built a scale-out unstructured object store that customers are now using to store petabytes of complex data. But what does complex mean, and how is that data being used? Renen explains how many of VAST customers are now at the exabyte level, more than might have been expected only a few years ago. What will customers do with this data? AI and analytics are the …
#215 – Stateless Compute Machines
In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin discuss network booting and the ability to create completely stateless servers. The idea of SAN booting has been around for two decades, enabling both the operating system disk and data disks to be delivered from SAN storage. NVMe/TCP and other NVMe-oF protocols promise the ability to implement the same capability for modern systems. Can this be done today? Why are more servers not booted from SAN? Is this a technical issue or one of practicality and comfort? With large-scale computing platforms, perhaps network booting will make (or already …
#214 – Can CloudFlare R2 Disrupt AWS S3?
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the announcement from CloudFlare of R2, a new object storage solution. With such a widely dispersed CDN network, could CloudFlare become a real competitor for S3, considering that the R2 platform will have no egress fees? This episode digs into the details, to look at what additional features object storage vendors need in their arsenal and whether there’s any other vendor likely to come close to competing with AWS. At the outset of the podcast, Chris mentions Dark Star, which did indeed have a tiny budget of only $60,000. …
#213 – Kubernetes-Native Data Protection
With KubeCon North America 2021 looming, Chris and Martin spend this week looking at data protection for Kubernetes-native environments. Vendors have started to introduce backup solutions, some working within the container environment itself, some outside as part of existing products. Exactly what should be backed up and how should these products work? Are we right to continue using snapshots or is there a better way? Do these solutions capture and retain enough metadata to provide for efficient data recovery? Lots of questions to ask and be answered in this show. Elapsed Time: 00:39:00 Timeline Related …
#212 – File Not Found
In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin get together to discuss the curious case of missing files. In this instance, the files weren’t actually missing, but according to an article in The Verge, students running a software simulation didn’t know how to determine their location. In a world where the current generation have grown up on iPhones and iPads (or similar devices) that present no inherent file and directory structure, is it any surprise that these concepts seem alien? What benefit is there to retaining strict and rigid file system structures and can we move …
#211 – Pure//Launch – Announcing Fusion and Portworx Data Services (Sponsored)
In this week’s sponsored episode, Chris chats to Alex McMullan, CTO International at Pure Storage. The discussion covers Pure//Launch and today’s announcements of two SaaS solutions – Fusion and Portworx Data Services. Fusion is a new SaaS management plane for administering and optimising Pure Storage hardware and software products, including FlashArray, FlashBlade and Cloud Block Store. Portworx Data Services enables customers to deploy and operate managed databases using the PX-Enterprise platform. Together, these two solutions provide an insight into the next stage of evolution and growth for Pure Storage. There’s a lot to unpack in …
#210 – Building SANs in the Cloud
This week, Chris and Martin discuss the merits of building virtual SANs in the public cloud. Vendors including Silk and Pure Storage now offer virtual storage “appliances” built from virtual instances and cloud storage. Why are these solutions necessary, when the public cloud providers have plenty of high-performance block and file storage offerings? The discussion looks at the why and how of these types of solutions as well as the implications and the lock-in they could represent. Elapsed Time: 00:33:53 Timeline 00:00:00 – Intros 00:04:00 – Silk and Pure Storage are two examples of cloud …
#209 – Discovering Unified Fast File and Object with Pure Storage (Sponsored)
In this week’s episode, Chris and Martin meet with Brian Carpenter, Senior Director of Unstructured Technology Strategy at Pure Storage, to talk about UFFO – Unified Fast File and Object. UFFO is a technology bringing together the two main types of unstructured data into a single platform – FlashBlade. The discussion centres on the benefits of using a single platform that offers high performance throughput for both file and object at the same time. Brian walks the team through use cases and how customers are using UFFO in their environments today. You can find out …
#208 – NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage – More Than a Good Marketing Message?
In this week’s podcast, Chris and Martin look at NVIDIA’s GPUDirect Storage (GDS), a technology for moving data directly from persistent storage to GPUs, bypassing the CPU. The aim of the technology is to provide greater throughput to keep GPUs active, and looking at some of the thoughts from our podcast with Liqid (#204), it’s clear that this feature is needed. However, with such quick adoption by many storage vendors, is the announcement of GDS more of a marketing exercise? We dig into the details and what the announcement of GDS could mean for the …